


We Were Young Once, and Brave

by Maidenjedi



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-29
Updated: 2013-06-29
Packaged: 2017-12-16 13:08:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,684
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/862365
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maidenjedi/pseuds/Maidenjedi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Peggy Carter and Howard Stark deal with the aftermath of losing Steve Rogers, over the years.  And how a certain artifact comes to rest in Tony Stark's garage.</p>
            </blockquote>





	We Were Young Once, and Brave

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lizardbeth](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lizardbeth/gifts).



> Spoilers for Captain America, MCU films to date. No comics-canon here.

Of course, she goes to the Stork Club. 

-

He isn't there. She wanted to believe he would be, with a shy grin, ready to hold out a hand and ask her for a dance. And they would dance. They would waltz and samba and he would follow her lead and it would be wonderful, it would be right....

But he is not there.

She blinks back tears, straightens her shoulders, and goes to the bar for a drink.

Just one.

And then home.

-

She returns. She loses track of when, how often, what she does when she's there. And it's not a seedy place, so she's seen, and she's discussed among the patrons and the wait staff. No one knows who she is waiting for, and no one thinks to ask.

Howard finds her, after he gets back from his search and has to break the news to her. Peggy is stoic, she accepts it, she is a soldier and so was Steve and this was the cost of freedom, she says, and Howard thinks she's a fool if she doesn't feel anything but he bites it back. It was war, and Steve sacrificed more than Howard ever could have, so he says nothing.

Peggy asks him to come with her, and he accepts, figuring that it was just as likely as any other scenario, that Steve could show up unannounced and unharmed at the Stork Club. 

They go together, and they drink after they don't see Steve waiting for them. He dances with her once, and she cries so hard in his arms he stops asking after that. It becomes a habit and they show up together dressed to the nines at the club like clockwork. And sooner or later they....

Fondue.

-

"I can't."

"Neither can I."

"This isn't right."

"Nothing is. Not anymore."

Peggy sighs, rolls over and away from him. He's still drunk, and she hasn't had a drink in hours. She wants one, but will not get up for it.

"We can't keep this up, Howard. Pretending he'll be there."

Pretending he's here, she thinks.

He rubs her back. "One day he will be." And Peggy buries her face in the sheets until Howard kisses her back and her ears and wakes up desire in her, soothes the ache.

The shield Howard's men found is in the corner of Howard's bedroom, and when the sun comes up it shines off it, right into their faces.

-

It could go on forever. They do deal with their grief, in their way. They stop going to the club, Peggy stops drinking, Howard gets back to real work, creating and building and theorizing. It is as close to ideal as it could get for awhile, and if Steve's ghost is a bit too real sometimes, they are careful not to say so to each other.

But Howard marries another girl, because Peggy would not say yes, and she goes back to London, and from there the countryside, and her trips to New York stop cold.

She can't even listen to American accent without her heart skipping, her body yearning. For Steve, for Howard. She doesn't know. It doesn't matter. 

Steve's picture is on her nightstand, later in her jewel box. He is impossibly young, and small, and determined. It's the last picture they took of him before the serum.

It is worn through in places from handling, from being crushed to her lips in prayer.

-

"What's his name?" She practically has to yell, the international connection is so bad.

"Anthony. Tony. We're calling him Tony."

She grins and congratulates Howard and she means it, she really does. No part of her wished Howard's son were hers, and she takes a deep breath to clear out any lurking feelings that she could have been a mother to someone else's son, in different circumstances.

Howard brings his son to England, when Tony is three or four. And he's the spitting image of his father, right down to the reckless way he runs and the charming way he grins. His mother is not there, and Howard kisses Peggy's neck when Tony's gone to bed.

"Howard, we...."

"I know." He rubs his face, sighs. She sees his age, their ages, all the loss and the calamity and the worry, just for a moment in his dark eyes. "We can't and we shouldn't and we have to be proper even when we don't want to be. After all these years, it's as though he were here, isn't it."

She shrugs. "Yes. And no. You have a wife. A son. I'm not just another cheap trick, I know those things and they stop me. It's not about him." Not entirely.

He holds out his hand, palm up, and she places hers in it. "Peggy, after all this, don't you think...."

And she does, a little, so she kisses him and he holds her for awhile, and they fall asleep like that.

-

There is a Cold War being fought, and Howard makes money and Peggy spies, they do their bits and exchange letters when they can. She's a better correspondent than he is. His letters always begin with "I can't believe it took me so long to write to you...."

They end with "I will write again soon. We should get together. Soon."

Soon.

-

"What did you do with his shield?"

She has come back to the States. To advise on a project in the State Department, something covert she's not sure Howard doesn't know everything about.

He looks at her in surprise. "It's where it always has been."

In the corner of his bedroom. Propped against a wall.

"Your wife never had an issue..."

"She never understood. But she accepted it."

And they don't mention it again.

-

There is one last great expedition to find him.

Howard leads it. He has a very public spat with his wife over the expense, the time away from home. It isn't publicized that he's going to look for his old friend, it comes off as a trip to dig for oil.

Peggy reads about it, buried in small print on the sixth or seventh page of the Times one Sunday morning. A great expedition to find oil. She notes the location. She holds on to hope.

They find neither.

 

-

Perhaps it is little surprise that Howard Stark dies young, or relatively so. Nothing is young, really, compared to Steve Rogers, or so Peggy thinks. 

He leaves behind his son, his wife having gone some years prior, and Tony's old enough to be out in the world and to not particularly care very much in public. 

Peggy goes to the funeral. No one there knows her at all, she's been gone so long. Howard's circle, in the last years, was comprised of men of means who wanted things from him, who used him. Not one of them, Peggy knows, was in the war. Maybe they stayed home and dodged, maybe they were too young. Even that brash politician of a man who eulogized Howard, that Obadiah Stane, knew little of the battlefield.

Howard had been to war, he'd seen it up close. She takes the time to remember their war and remember him during it, as she sits in the back at his wake.

The coffin is open. Tony stumbles up to it (drunk or high, no one knows for sure) and he lets loose a string of words that Peggy is sure are a plea for his father to come back as much as a condemnation on his seeming neglect. 

Peggy has things to tell Tony, stories and truths to pass on. But not now. One day. 

She stays at the grave longer than anyone, even Tony, and watches for ghosts in the early evening mist.

-

She returns home gratefully, and tired. She aches and she refuses to look in a mirror. 

She opens her jewel box, which holds no jewels at all, just the fading picture of Steve Rogers.

"We were young once," she whispers. "You, me, Howard, all of us. Are you young still?"

He would be, or could be. If the serum did what it was purported to do. And he was so brave, he was, he was not foolish and he was not a martyr. She won't think of him like that.

She blinks hard, thinking about the funeral, how they'd never had one for Steve. She's lost in thought when there is a knock at her door, and it startles her back to the present. She wipes her face and tries not to run to the door. 

"Are you Miss Peggy Carter?" It is a fresh-faced, boyish courier. He's got a package, a large one that threatens to overwhelm him.

"I am."

"Sign please." She sees a clipboard hanging from the tips of his fingers as he holds it and the box.

She signs. "What is it?"

The courier shrugs. "Have a nice day."

"Yes, you too...." Her voice trails off as she sees the slip declaring the package's origins. Stark Industries.

She tears into it, not willing to wait, and she finds the shield. His shield.

And a note. "I know, I should write more often. Wouldn't have to if you'd agree to a puddle-jump for fondue! I couldn't stand to think of this gathering dust. You should have it. Will write again soon, Howard."

-

_Some years later_

The package arrives as Tony is leaving for a gala, a blonde on each arm, and Pepper accepts it, as it's part of her new job.

"Dear Tony," begins the letter. Pepper scans it, decides he has to read it, puts it on his work table. She props the package next to his chair and goes about the business of closing up the house so she can leave. She tries not to mess with her boss' personal life - the life he doesn't talk about or bring home clad in a thong, anyway.

The letter eventually gets put away with the other things Tony never reads but somehow can't throw away, and the shield gathers dust in his garage.

-

END

**Author's Note:**

> There was an article in the Chicago Tribune in 1998 with this title, which is kind of where I got the inspiration for it. It's also a play on the title of Joseph Galloway's book "We Were Soldiers Once, and Young," about the Vietnam War.


End file.
